Business Issues
By Joe Frigo
Plugging the Visibility Gap
Turning remote equipment monitoring into a daily discipline
Ask an operations manager why a job went sideways and the answer is rarely“ lack of talent.” More often, the culprit is a pin‐hole leak in visibility: a spreader bar double‐booked, a crew member missing a certification or the wrong paperwork still sitting on a dispatcher’ s desk. None of this happens because people are careless. It happens because the operation is a vessel with dozens of small leaks that drain time and margin. Patch one hole and five more open.
Most owners attack leaks one at a time. They buy a sensor, bolt on a point solution or build a spreadsheet. Maybe an immediate hole is plugged, but a new one opens because the job is scheduled on a white board, the work order is on paper, a job hazard analysis isn’ t filled out, or the stack of paperwork lives on someone’ s desk and still needs to be processed. The cost shows up as idle cranes, overtime and invoices that linger unbilled.
Global studies confirm what we see on the yard: 98 % of construction projects run late or over budget and 96 % of the data we generate on those jobsites is never reused. For crane owners, that lost data translates directly into wasted motion.
Technology alone does not fix those operational problems. Daily
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August 2025 • www. cranehotline. com